White Gold investigates the slave trade in North Africa – the enslavement of white people that saw almost one million Europeans enslaved between 1600 and 1800. and mirrored its black counterpart in the cruelty and degradation of individuals. Milton focuses on the Moroccan slave markets of Salé and Meknes, where slaves were fattened up before being sold at auction. The author reconstructs the voyage of an English ship, the Francis, which was captured by Barbary corsairs in 1716. He investigates the fate of the captured crew, focusing on the cabin boy, Thomas Pellow, who was to be enslaved at the court of the Moroccan sultan for the next twenty three years.
The sultan, Mulay Ismail, a cruel and capricious master: was in the midst of constructing a vast imperial palace to adorn his capital, Meknes. The palace was being built as a conscious attempt by Mulay Ismail to outshine his French contemporary, King Louis XIV, whose Palace of Versailles had been completed a few years earlier. The sultan's slaves – among them Pellow and his 51 shipmates – were compelled to work on the palace's construction. It was gruelling physical labour made worse by the brutal slave drivers who beat any slave who slacked in his work.
Milton's narrative draws on original documents, unpublished diaries and manuscript letters housed in The National Archives and the British Library manuscript collection. White Gold also makes use of the published narrative written by Pellow himself.
One English slave, Abraham Browne, left a detailed account of his life in the days prior to being sold. He was fed 'fresh vitteles once a daye and sometimes twice in abondance, with good white breade from the market place.' Browne correctly surmised that the bread was 'to feed us up for the markett that we might be in some good plight agaynst the day wee weare to be sold.' Once bought, most slaves never again saw freedom. The vast majority were to die in captivity.
Thomas Pellow had a different fate: he would eventually escape and make his return to England. He found passage aboard a ship bound for Penryn, Cornwall. When he arrived home in 1738, 23 years after leaving home, Pellow's parents did not recognise their son.
Read more about this topic: Giles Milton
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